identify spell pointless?

Identify should actually cost MORE in a shop than 100 GP; that's the cost for a player character (as Gaear said, that's RAW), and since when do shopkeepers do things for no profit?

 

I don't know, a lot of times a business will provide a service without profit to increase customer satisfaction. Many restaurants give free refills on their drinks, for example.

 

Playability vs realism is a constant tug-of-war. The balance is fine for me; I am not going to complain that the game doesn't track the food my characters eat because stuff can become too time consuming.

 

Speaking as a first time player I have to say I found the identification of items, scrolls and particularly potions problematic at first and simply irritating now I'm deep into the adventure.

I don't bother with the Identify spell (even though I have it and for me wasted a slot getting it), I occasionally use the wand of Identify to identify rings in-dungeon, but normally I just go to the shop and have everything Identified simply becasue it's much easier, just click, click, click etc rather than slog through the spell interface for each item.

I do slog through identifying potions with Read Magic since both my mage and cleric have this level 0 spell I can do a big batch whist healing up, but it is a boring chore.

There does not appear to be a "Lore" skill per BG et al in this game, but if it was possible to replicate the "Glasses of Identification" item from BG and implement it automatically for all items in the wearers inventory, I would do that like a shot.

My main justification is that since you don't know what items you have until you get to the shop, you can't think out your sales/equip/store strategy on the way there, and I find I often make mistakes selling something I should have looked more closely at and have to go back and recover it or reload the shopping episode and slog through it all again. This is becasue I basically just want to unload the weight, reset my spells and get back to the action, so I'm often not in the mood to carefully think through the merits of each item whist at the shop.

I'm sure this isn't a problem for people who have played this several times, but for a new player it is IMO.

 

The option to bind radial menu options to quick-keys is your friend. Just pick your favourite key.

 

Guess so. I've been so overwhelmed by the number of radial menu options that I haven't really worked out a way of using that feature yet, what with all the millions combat options I'm not used to yet and so on. Suppose that's why they didn't put a default set of hot keys into the game. There's so many options and not enough keys, how could they know which ones people would want etc.

You're right though - for repetative tasks like identifying, that's a damn good idea.

 

It might also help to craft a Helm of Reading Magic, which lets whoever's wearing it cast Read Magic at will.

 

@Gregorovitch: Ctrl+the key you want to bind.

@Gaear: Search, Lockpick, Sneak, Charge Attack, Read Magic, Identify, Magic Missle, occasionally some buff spells. I've never actually used ready vs. approach and 5 foot step, so no need to bind them. RVA seems useful, but I prefer offensive fighting. FFS out of someone's reach is too much cheese.

 

wait, what? I don't recall that option...

 

Like Ausdoerrt said, press ctrl and the key of your choice simultaneously. The radial menu shoud come up, and whatever you select on there will be bound to the key you pressed. From then on, pressing that key will be a shortcut that activates that radial menu selection, if it's available to the character.

 

Sad thing is, most people seems to not know about this feature at all. I know I came to know it by accident back in the day...

 

Well, I haven't seen much use for it other than FFS out of reach, and that's just boring cheese.